I shall begin with some attempt to define our subject, and then take you through the dragons of classical antiquity and early Christendom down to the twilight uncertainty of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the blank incredulity of our modern age. I shall then go back to the earliest legends of all—the Egyptian, and close with an attempt to harmonize the whole, and with a critical estimate of the place of the dragon in human thought and experience.
I
OF DRAGONS IN GENERAL
In Glastonbury, where St. Dunstan took the devil by the nose and where the Pilgrim’s Inn is dedicated to St. George and the Dragon, the dragon will always be an object of peculiar interest, not to say veneration. (So true is this that on the 16th October, 1906, the Somerset County Council, on the advice of its Chairman, adopted as its sole device “Gules, a dragon rampant, or,” though the recognition of its increasing importance has since led it to add—15th October, 1912—the mace of office, “at a cost not exceeding £20.”)
For Milton writes in one of his most harmonious numbers:
The old Dragon under ground
In straiter limits bound
Not half so far casts his usurpéd sway.
And wroth to see his kingdom fail
Swings the scaly horrour of his folded tail.